The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society

By David Garland

Book Overview

The past 30 years have seen vast changes in our attitudes toward crime. More and more of us live in gated communities; prison populations have skyrocketed; and issues such as racial profiling, community policing, and "zero-tolerance" policies dominate the headlines. How is it that our response to crime and our sense of criminal justice has come to be so dramatically reconfigured? David Garland charts the changes in crime and criminal justice in America and Britain over the past twenty-five years, showing how they have been shaped by two underlying social forces: the distinctive social organization of late modernity and the neoconservative politics that came to dominate the United States and the United Kingdom in the 1980s.

Garland explains how the new policies of crime and punishment, welfare and security-and the changing class, race, and gender relations that underpin them-are linked to the fundamental problems of governing contemporary societies, as states, corporations, and private citizens grapple with a volatile economy and a culture that combines expanded personal freedom with relaxed social controls. It is the risky, unfixed character of modern life that underlies our accelerating concern with control and crime control in particular. It is not just crime that has changed; society has changed as well, and this transformation has reshaped criminological thought, public policy, and the cultural meaning of crime and criminals. David Garland's The Culture of Control offers a brilliant guide to this process and its still-reverberating consequences.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226283844
• ISBN13: 9780226283845
• Release Date: August 2002
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

seminal work on US mass incarceration

I'm surprised no one else has reviewed this book - I guess they're too busy trying to alter this trend. Garland's book represents an extremely solid, well-written and methodical approach to how and why the US rate and absolute number of imprisonment is the highest in the world. Garland reached an understanding of how this trend happened, was this process: 1. A shift from `penal welfare' to `retributive' model... 2. Prompted by social and tech. changes. 3. Enabled by a shift to political conservatism. 4. Resulting in a marginalization of subgroups. 5. Who were blamed for the problems in society, as was the liberal penal welfare model. 6. This shift resulted from a desire for security, order and control missing following #2. 7. And led to a combination of `market and moral discipline' with more controls on the poor and fewer on everyone else. He finds that the current system of mass incarceration does the following: -Creates systematic social, economic and political exclusion by race (social marginality) -Develops and supports criminal underclass through criminogenic nature of incarceration and parole/probation rules -Understates unemployment rate by removing `unemployable' from society. -Alters norms and values of communities across generations. -Creates a gulag system of economy, where prisoners are increasingly perform work for government and private business without pay. That's a very brief summary, I could go into much greater detail, but I'll stop here. This book is now being cited by any serious inquiry into the phenomenon. However, despite its being very well-written, it's a thick read, so I would not recommend it for an undergrad text.